Chadian Pres. Idriss Déby won 63% of the vote in the May 2001 presidential election, securing for himself another five-year term, but this was only after many irregular electoral practices. Opposition members of the electoral commission resigned before the results were announced, maintaining that the election had been rigged. The opposition parties continued to refuse to accept the results, but their appeal to the constitutional court failed, protest meetings were banned, and demonstrations were broken up. Such actions cost Déby support, both within the country and in the international community. He postponed the legislative elections until 2002, and the opposition feared that in the interval he would use his patronage to strengthen his party, the Patriotic Salvation Movement.

By mid-2001 the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was approaching the end of the voluntary repatriation of thousands of people who had fled Chad for Cameroon in the 1980s. More than 40,000 Chadian refugees in Cameroon did not return to their homeland, however, in part because of the deteriorating political situation in northern Chad. The Movement for Democracy and Justice in Chad (MDJT) continued fighting in the Tibesti region in the northwest, close to the Libyan border, under Youssouf Togoimi, a former defense minister. In July the MDJT claimed to have captured the strategic town of Fada and opened a new front 900 km (560 mi) northeast of the capital, N’Djamena. President Déby suspected that Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi was helping the rebels.